


behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream

by larvae



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: M/M, POV Crowley (Good Omens), Pining, Purple Prose, Romantic love, referencing uncited gay poetry, shamelessly paraphrasing like the entirety of the song of solomon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 03:27:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20075356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/larvae/pseuds/larvae
Summary: God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:Exit seraphim and Satan's men:I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.Crowley dreams of Aziraphale.





	behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream

Crowley was unlike other demons in that he had a rather impressive imagination. This bears noting despite it being the least impressive of the differences between himself and his fallen fellows. This is because Crowley's imagination — in addition to assisting him in sowing seeds of discord throughout the mortals among whom he lurked — allowed him to dream.

"Allow" would hardly be the right verbiage, if it were up to Crowley to tell you. Perhaps it cursed him with dreams. It dulled the whirling saber of his mind with dreams. It tormented his nighttime rest with unearthly visions (or, worse and more often, with Earthly ones).

Most demons, in addition to having no imaginations, have no need to sleep. Crowley didn't really have "need" to sleep either, but when you've been squashed into a human body that was issued back before the beginning of the world by a bloke you suspect didn't give much of a toss about precisely tailored measurements, sleep can be... nice. Not necessary, but nice. And what kind of a demon denies himself his indulgences?

But when Crowley laid his troubled head to rest, he dreamed. And when he dreamed, he dreamed of Aziraphale.

At first it was only a sense of Aziraphale. An encroaching goodness on his mostly nonsensical fragments of memory. He had approached head office about a potential error in his issued Earthly vehicle. Perhaps he was too evil to inhabit it and the meat had started to go off. No, said head office, very unlikely. And you're bothering us anyway, there's a great deal we must attend to. Haven't you a young man to woo from the light and a prefect to torment? He had and he did, and neither of those faces or the temptations he (expertly, let it be known) laid upon them made their way into the odd delirium of motion pictures his mind had taken to showing him at night.

But the angel did. Not any angel. Not a threatening sense of a watching angel, or the familiar rotted scent of a fallen angel. His angel. Or, that is to say, the angel with whom he was most well acquainted.

Aziraphale. Former steward of the Eastern Gate of Eden. Nancy boy.

He had asked him about it once, over oysters.

"Do your lot have dreams?"

"Oh? For the future?" he had quipped brightly.

"No, I know you have ideas about the future I m-"

"Yes, it will all be in accordance with the plan."

"The p-"

"Yes," Aziraphale said jubilantly over the rim of his nearly drained chalice (his third, but Crowley wasn't counting) "the ineffable plan."

"Right. But no, no. Not your damn ineffable plan. Not for the future. Just dreams. Pictures what whirl around your eyeballs when you're trying to keep them shut."

"Well..." the question had given him pause, which should have given Crowley a sense of accomplished satisfaction but only soured the ill humor he had begun his day with, "Well you mean... like how humans dream? No. No, well, I mean, we don't sleep, Craw- Crowley."

The angel could have said "we" to mean "angels" but the way he said it — over a silver tray of empty oyster shells with a now very empty chalice in his hand, across a small table set in the shade at which two could dine on a balmy Roman afternoon — made it sound like it meant him and Crowley, put together for the first time since the world was new as a "we".

"No... 'course not," Crowley scoffed, "But you can't tell me you don't nap."

"Ah," said Aziraphale, rather bashfully, "well certainly if my Earthly duties are attended to and the sun She set to shine upon us is _particularly_ warm and gentle that day..."

"But I don't..." the angel caught himself, "I don't dream, Crowley. Do you?"

"Don't be an idiot," said Crowley through a too-large swig of his own wine, "I don't sleep."

As his visits with Aziraphale grew more frequent on Earth, so did Aziraphale's visits to Crowley's overactive nighttime imagination. He was more real, now. More corporeal. Not the vague idea of an angel, or a waft of his parchment glue and sandalwoody smell that Crowley was disgusted to find his unquiet mind could reproduce perfectly. It was him. Graceful white feathers and phlegmatic expression clear as the midday sun. Or the midnight stars as it were. Crowley took to sleeping during the day like a spoiled cat. This helped not at all.

Demons, of course, cannot fall in love. So it stands to reason that Crowley hadn’t fallen in love. But perhaps he’d sauntered vaguely downwards until he’d found himself mired in it. Love, that is. Perverse, unthinkable, Earthly, improbable _love_; reserved for angels and humans and Satan’s former employer.

And he’d picked a hell of an angel to be in it with.

Aziraphale, to his credit and to Crowley’s unending torment, was decidedly unlike other angels, both fallen and unsullied. His Earthly indulgences were unlike Crowley’s in substance but they threatened to eclipse them in number. He loved food, and ate with a carnal delight that bordered on bloodlust. He loved sleeping in on fine linens, letting the buttery light of late afternoon part his pale lashes, and tucking green carnations into his velvet buttonholes, and hoarding leather bound first editions. Where Crowley fancied himself an aesthete, Aziraphale was a committed sensualist. But it was remarkable how often those frames of mind met in the middle; over wine and whiskey and lager and ale, under moonlight and sunlight, foul weather or fair.

But no matter the ends to which Crowley chased Aziraphale on Earth (well, he wouldn’t go so far as to call it “chasing”, more so tailing, tracking, surveilling, gathering counterintelligence), the angel was relentless in his interruptions of what should have been his idle indulgence of sloth.

In all his interruptions the angel was just the same bookish, pert, foppish principality he had been in Eden and was now on Earth.

But here, when he was with Crowley, he was feeding him choice morsels off his plate, leaning over to straighten his lapel, or else kissing him with the kisses of his mouth, which poured forth sweeter than wine in a house of cedar, under rafters of fir. In Crowley’s dreams their fingers interlaced as their palms met, and the angel’s pale lashes fluttered against his cheek. He stood in human form and in Ether; comely, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, his flaming sword upon his thigh, his lips like threads of scarlet and his eyes like mourning doves. 

Crowley felt like he would go insane. He worried, with increasing frequency, that he already had. He waited for some hundred odd years for the angel to make mention of the evening in Amboise when, over a flagon of red wine, they had talked themselves through the night and past the morning, and Crowley had kissed each knuckle on each finger of both the angel’s hands until the blush across his fair face had risen past his ears. A century past with Aziraphale in seemingly stalwart denial of the fact before it crossed Crowley’s mind that he may have dreamed the whole encounter.

The angel came to him as a saintly motorcyclist, a sailor to caress him with Atlantic and Caribbean love, in rose gardens and public parks and cemeteries. They sailed the sea and walked the beaches of undiscovered islands, and there Crowley was permitted to put his lips against the angel’s in chaste, long-dwelling kisses. They journeyed hand in hand through forests and nights of dark trees, and so joined and unafraid they found banks of budding roses tucked beneath the shadowy cypresses.

Their Earthly meetings continued in parallel to Crowley’s imagined trysts, and very quickly an accord was settled between them to foment and dissuade unrest in equal measure. It was Crowley’s suggestion that they collaborate. For efficiency’s sake.

During one such enactment of this arrangement, the pair found themselves on a halcyon hillside just beneath the French Alps. Their handiwork completed for the day, having agitated and assuaged until it all balanced right back out again, they turned to idle chatter.

“So,” said Crowley innocently, “have you been sleeping well?”

Aziraphale flushed.

“Ah, well,” he stammered bashfully, “only when required. That is, only when the situation calls — or, that is to say, if it would help my Heavenly mission to indul- to…. to partake in —“

“Oh shove off,” Crowley teased, “it’s a lovely afternoon we’ve found ourselves in the middle of. And we’ve wrapped up our business with the cattery — ”

“The abbey,” the angel chastised.

Crowley turned his yellow eyes towards the angel, flashing a cheeky smile, “Fancy a nap?”

A look passed across Aziraphale’s face that seemed better suited to splay across a thousand flaming eyes dotted across two dozen white gold wings. For a moment, the space between them was filled only with the idyllic ambiance of the countryside.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said finally, carefully, “Yes, alright, Crowley. I don’t… I wouldn’t see the harm.”

“‘Course not,” Crowley balked, “There isn’t any.”

That afternoon, beneath the dappled shadow of a beech tree, his head slumped peacefully against Aziraphale’s right shoulder, the demon Crowley slept like the dead.

**Author's Note:**

> [Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath](https://allpoetry.com/Mad-Girl's-Love-Song)   
[Song of Solomon](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Song+of+Solomon+1&version=KJV)   
[Howl by Allen Ginsberg](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl)   
[Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand by Walt Whitman](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49204/whoever-you-are-holding-me-now-in-hand)   
[The Dance Song by Friedrich Nietzsche](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm)


End file.
